The History of IC Design Activities in Turkey

The History of IC Design Activities in Turkey

by Duran Leblebici

Starting from the late 1950s and early 1960s, the emergence of the transistor and then the integrated circuits forced the universities to reconsider and to tune their electronic engineering curricula. As in many institutions on the world, in Istanbul Technical University (ITU), that has pioneered the activities in the microelectronics in Turkey, solid state devices and electronic circuits with discrete bipolar transistors rapidly replaced the vacuum electronics and electron tube circuits in electronics courses. Apart from the electronic circuits in general, the first courses dedicated to the analog and digital integrated circuits appeared in the second half of 60s. The objective of these courses was to give an insight to the students as the future "users" of the integrated circuits, but not as "designers". In the mean time, the development of the MOS IC technology had influenced the contents of the courses and the relative simplicity of the technology encouraged us to start experimenting with the manufacturing technology. In parallel, to strengthen the future staff of the department, we sent two young graduates abroad for making their Ph.D. in microelectronics - this also turned out to be a very valuable investment.

In mid 70s, the first microelectronic laboratory has been established in a 90 m2 room with a very limited budget. We realized the major part of the infrastructure and some of the instruments used in fabrication, by ourselves. The "spin-on" technology was the only doping possibility in our laboratory. In this laboratory it was possible to fabricate the aluminum gate PMOS transistors and small-scale ICs with 10 micron gate lengths, with reasonable and repeatable characteristics. Eventually, NMOS and VMOS transistors were also fabricated in this very modest laboratory. In parallel to these developments, the "design" of devices and circuits inevitably became a part of the education.

As a by-product of these activities, in early 80s a new microelectronics laboratory (YITAL) has been established at Marmara Research Center of TUBITAK to give R-D support to a government owned company, TESTAS, that was planned to fabricate bipolar transistors and ICs. The company was not able to start but the laboratory fabricated the first bipolar ICs with 7 micron standard technology in 1983. In the early 90s, with the financial support of the NATO SfS program, the technology of this laboratory has been upgraded for 1.5 micron polysilicon gate, double metal CMOS process. In time, this laboratory evolved into a small-scale silicon foundry fabricating CMOS VLSI chips, mainly for the data security purposes. As a natural development, a VLSI design group has been organized to give dedicated design services to this foundry. The fabrication technology was subsequently upgraded to 0.7 micron double-polysilicon CMOS, and more recently, it is being upgraded once again to 0.35 micron SiGe technology. Since more than 20 years, the TUBITAK-YITAL foundry continues to operate as the only CMOS/BiCMOS integrated circuit manufacturing facility in Turkey, with complete in-house capabilities of system definition, design, fabrication, packaging, testing, and validation.

In the second half of 1980s, the ITU Advanced Electronic Technologies Foundation (ITU-ETA Foundation) has been established by ITU and the leading electronics and telecommunication companies, namely BEKO, NETAS, SIEMENS, TELETAS and VESTEL. The foundation organized conferences and panel discussions to motivate the companies to use their own ASICs in the next generations of their products and training courses for engineers to give them the basics of the VLSI circuit design. In 1991 the foundation established the first professional ASIC Design Center of Turkey. In parallel to these activities, ITU has applied for the membership of the EUROCHIP organization (now EUROPRACTICE) of the European Union, and was accepted as the first university from a non-member country. With a funding from EU, a VLSI Design Laboratory has been established and equipped at ITU, dedicated only to the education and research purposes. Around the same time frame, the first VLSI design oriented courses appeared in the curriculum.

These developments were successfully "mirrored" in some of the other top universities in Turkey. The numbers of staff members interested in VLSI design, as well as the numbers and qualities of the VLSI design oriented courses and theses increased. The number of the EUROPRACTICE member universities also increased in time. Today, 10 universities in Turkey are members of the EUROPRACTICE organization:

Bilkent University (Ankara)

Bogazici University (Istanbul)

Dokuz Eylul University (Izmir)

Istanbul Technical University (Istanbul)

Kocaeli University (Kocaeli)

Koc University (Istanbul)

Middle East Technical University (Ankara)

Sabanci University (Istanbul)

Yeditepe University (Istanbul)

Yildiz Technical University (Istanbul)

In addition, two government owned research institutions are among the EUROPRACTICE members:

TUBITAK-BILTEN (Ankara)

TUBITAK-UEKAE (Kocaeli)

According to official EUROPRACTICE statistics, the number of chips sent by university design groups and fabricated through the MPW (Multi-Project Wafer) program to date, are as follows:

Bilkent University 5

Bogazici University 5

Istanbul Technical University 15

Middle East Technical University 8

Sabanci University 6

In the beginning phase of these activities the majority of the graduates taking microelectronics related courses went to other countries (mostly to the U.S.) to work as process or design engineers in microelectronics companies. But eventually, the companies preferred to come here to benefit from these well educated and talented young engineers. Their presence also encourages the growing pool of young microelectronics engineers in Turkey. Today, there are six professional VLSI design houses in and around Istanbul, four of them situated in the ITU Campus:

"Microelectronic R-D, Design and Trade Ltd.", the new form of the ITU-ETA ASIC Design Center, making H-F analog design, mostly for Si-Ge technology for local industry.

"Spectra-Linear Istanbul Design Centre", making analog and digital designs for the parent company.

This is a brief story; yesterday and today of the developments in the field of microelectronics education in Turkey. During those days we were lucky, because the technology was in its early take-off period. Today, the technology is approaching its physical limits. Although the slew-rate decreases, the use and the influence of microelectronics will continue to expand, at least for several decades, not only along the already known paths but not-yet-known paths. I think that this is the chance of the young generation, for which - sincerely - I am envious.